01011117 This Day In History, November 17

284: Diocletian was proclaimed Emperor of Rome (see A History Of Jerusalem: Pompey And The Caesars and Pax Romana: The Birth Of The Roman Empire).

375: Valentinian, Emperor of the western Roman empire, died of apoplexy (a stroke) in Pannonia (a Roman province in central Europe) after being enraged by the insolence of "barbarian" envoys who were defeating Rome's legions in the forests of Germany and refusing to bow before the defeated "divine" Caesar. Germany later succeeded Rome as the "Holy Roman Empire Of The German Nation" (see The Holy Roman Empire Of The German Nation).

474: Roan Emperor Leo II died after a reign of 10 months. He was succeeded by his father Zeno, who becomes sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire.

1278: 680 Jews were arrested (293 were hanged) in England for counterfeiting coins.

1292: John Balliol became King of Scotland.

1539: Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto arrived at the location of what is today Mobile, Alabama.

1558: The Elizabethan era began, with the coronation Queen Elizabeth I of England. She restored the Church of England, which had been established by King Henry VIII in 1534, after her half-sister Queen Mary (Mary Tudor) had turned England back under the control of the Church of Rome.

1636: Henrique Diaz, Brazilian general, won a decisive battle against Dutch colonial forces in Brazil.

1796: Napoleon defeated an Italian army near the Alpone River in Italy.

1855: Scottish explorer David Livingston discovered (for Europeans) Victoria Falls in Africa.

1869: The modern Suez Canal opened after 10 years of construction.

1903: The Russian Socialist movement divided into two factions, the Bolsheviks who supported Vladimir Lenin, and the Mensheviks who followed Georgi Plekhanov. By the 1980s the socialist economic system had proven itself to be a dismal failure.

1913: The first ship crossed through the Panama Canal.

1917: During the First World War (listen to our Sermon The European World Wars), British Field Marshal Edmund Allenby's troops entered the Jerusalem hills prior to the taking of the city (listen to our Sermon The Balfour Declaration). That same day, German General von Falkenhayn left Jerusalem for Nablus, the Biblical Shechem, 40 miles to the north, while falsely assuring the Ottomans (listen to our Sermon The Ottoman Empire) that reinforcements would be sent.

1918: Influenza deaths in the U.S. were reported as higher than the number of U.S. troops killed in battle during the First World War (although the U.S. entered the First World War during only the last 18 months of the 4 year war that devastated Europe from 1914 to 1918; listen to our Sermon The European World Wars).

1919: King George V of the United Kingdom proclaimed Armistice Day. It was later observed as Remembrance Day, while a U.S. observance of Armistice Day became known as Veteran's Day.

1941: Less than a month before Japan's attack on the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Japanese Prime Minister General Tojo outlined a three-point plan he said was aimed at peace in East Asia.

1954: General Gamal Abdel Nasser became Egyptian head of state following the fall of President Mohamed Naguib.

1966: The Great Leonid meteor storm was observed in western North America, estimated at 144,000 meteors per hour / 40 per second - the most intense meteor shower ever observed. The meteor storm lasted less than 1 hour and was caused when the earth passed through a dense patch of the Leonid meteor stream. Leonids enter the atmosphere at 162,000 m.p.h., the fastest of any shower meteors, and burn up at an altitude between 80 and 55 miles.

1967: The U.S. unmanned Surveyor 6 spacecraft became the first man-made vehicle to land and take off from the Moon (the Russians were the first to land an unmanned vehicle on the moon).

1970: The Russian Luna 17 spacecraft landed an 8-wheeled lunar vehicle on the moon.

1973: During the Watergate break in investigation, Richard Nixon made his famous denial to the Associated Press, "People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook." Nixon resigned the next year when he could no longer deny and impede his impeachment and criminal prosecution.

1997: Muslim terrorists disguised as police opened fire on tourists in Egypt, killing over 70 British, Swiss, German and Japanese people.